How Pauline Hanson's One Nation Went from Fringe to Mainstream

A political wave that has already reshaped governments across Europe and North America has now reached Australian shores. Pauline Hanson's One Nation party — long derided as a fringe curiosity — has surged into the mainstream, winning its first lower house seat in a federal by-election and leading several national opinion polls, rattling the major parties and commanding the political conversation.

The rise mirrors patterns seen in comparable democracies. Dr Benjamin Moffitt, a populism researcher at Monash University who has tracked One Nation since its emergence in the late 1990s, describes the party as a textbook example of what political scientists call a populist radical right movement — one that combines anti-elite rhetoric with nativist immigration politics and authoritarian law-and-order stances. "If you had a conference of all these populist radical right parties," Moffitt says, "Hanson would fit right in. She's singing from the same hymn book" as parties like Germany's AfD, the Netherlands' Party for Freedom and France's National Rally.

At the centre of it all is a figure whose biography is unlikely by any political standard. Hanson began her public life as a fish and chip shop owner in Ipswich, on Brisbane's outer fringe, before entering politics as a Queensland Liberal candidate in the mid-1990s. She was expelled from the party after publishing a column containing openly racist commentary targeting Indigenous Australians — yet still won her seat because ballot papers could not be reprinted in time. She went on to found One Nation and delivered a maiden parliamentary speech in 1996 declaring Australia was "in danger of being swamped by Asians."

The party enjoyed a brief surge in Queensland state elections in 1998 before fading from relevance. Hanson lost her own federal seat that year and was later convicted of electoral fraud in 2003, though the conviction was subsequently overturned on appeal. She returned to federal politics in 2016, winning a Senate seat, and updated her signature line in her new maiden speech: this time, the warning was about Muslims rather than Asians.

Despite lacking the polished delivery of peers like Nigel Farage, Hanson's unscripted, outsider image is central to her appeal. "She doesn't present and doesn't talk like a polished politician," Moffitt says — and for her supporters, that is precisely the point. The party has also attracted significant financial backing, with Australia's wealthiest person, mining magnate Gina Rinehart, donating a million-dollar aircraft to help Hanson campaign across regional Australia.

The timing of the current surge reflects a confluence of pressures. Last year's federal election delivered the centre-left Labor government under Prime Minister Anthony Albanese a surprise landslide, leaving the conservative Liberal-National coalition in internal disarray. That collapse of the traditional right-of-centre anchor has opened space for One Nation to absorb disaffected voters. At the same time, Australians are grappling with a severe housing affordability crisis that is locking younger generations out of home ownership, cost-of-living pressures driven by global economic conditions, and ongoing unease over immigration levels — fertile ground for the kind of grievance politics One Nation has trafficked in for three decades.

Whether the current poll numbers translate into lasting electoral representation remains to be seen. But experts note that Hanson's greatest political legacy may be less about seats won and more about the issues she has forced onto the national agenda — a dynamic that shows no signs of slowing.